Metric Seattle

This campaign was developed with Tim Donnelly, Lauren Jong and Erin Hovland in the Exhibit Design class with Kristine Matthews at UW. We designed an exhibit to go in downtown Seattle encouraging Seattleites to become America's first metric city.

While the U.S. has attempted to convert to the metric system before, that process failed from lack of popular support. Among many issues, citizens had no knowledge of the units, and the metric system was seen as something foreign, or un-American.

Our campaign, therefore, was based around these two points. We decided to use an Americana look and feel to appeal to a sense of patriotism, and Seattle seemed like a perfect location, having a fairly liberal and open-minded reputation with a strong technology and engineering presence. Each of our panels focused on different metric units to educate the public in a tangible form, and we used humor to make a seemingly complicated concept more accessible.To accompany the exhibit, we implemented guerilla marketing tactics, designed take-away kits and other signage around the city.